Hyper Focus by Chris Bailey
WHY FOCUS MATTERS
Attention Is Everywhere
I began to see focus as not only a contributor to my productivity but also a factor in my overall well-being. Surprisingly, I learned that one of the best practices for fostering my creativity and productivity was learning how to unfocus. By paying attention to nothing in particular and letting my mind wander—as I did on my way to the Kingston diner—I found that I became better at making connections between ideas and coming up with new ones.
I also found that we encounter more distraction today than we have in the entire history of humanity. Studies show we can work for an average of just forty seconds in front of a computer before we’re either distracted or interrupted
While trying to do more tasks simultaneously, we prevent ourselves from finishing any one task of significance. And I began to discover that by focusing deeply on just one important thing at a time—hyperfocusing—we become the most productive version of ourselves
This is an essential skill in today’s world, when we are so often in distracting environments doing brain-heavy knowledge work.
This book takes you on a guided tour through my exploration of the subject of focus. I’ll share not only the fascinating things I’ve learned but also how to actually put those ideas to use in your own life (I’ve road-tested all of them). Productivity research is great—but pretty useless when you don’t act upon it. In this way, I see Hyperfocus as a sort of “science-help” book; one that explores the fascinating research behind how you focus but also bridges those insights with your daily life to explore ways you can manage your attention better to become more productive and creative. These ideas have already changed one life (mine), and I know they can do the same for you too. On the surface, the results can seem a bit like magic, but magic stops being magic the moment you know how it’s done.
HOW TO BETTER FOCUS ON THIS BOOK
Reading this book is your first chance to put your focus to the test, and the more attention you can dedicate to it, the more you’ll get out of the time spent on it. Let’s begin on a practical note with seven ways to focus more deeply while reading.
But first, a quick comment. If I’ve learned one thing from my research, it’s that productivity is highly personal. Everyone is uniquely wired and has different routines—as a result, not all productivity tactics will mesh comfortably with your life. Not to mention the fact that you may simply not want to follow some of the advice I offer. Experiment with as many of these focus tactics as you can, and adopt whatever works for you
1. PUT YOUR PHONE OUT OF SIGHT
When your mind is even slightly resisting a task, it will look for more novel things to focus on. Our smartphones are a great example—they provide an endless stream of bite-sized, delicious information for our brains to consume
2. MIND YOUR ENVIRONMENT
Look up and around you: Where are you reading this book? How likely are you to be distracted or interrupted as you read, and is there a place you could go to avoid those distractions
3. MAKE A DISTRACTIONS LIST
Maintaining a distractions list as you read will capture the important things that float to the surface of your consciousness
4. QUESTION WHETHER THIS BOOK IS WORTH CONSUMING AT ALL
Attention is finite and is the most valuable ingredient you have to live a good life—so make sure everything you consume is worthy of it.
5. CONSUME SOME CAFFEINE BEFORE READING
Caffeine provides an invaluable focus boost, and while you usually have to pay this energy back later in the day as the drug metabolizes out of your system, the costs are often worth it
6. GRAB A PEN OR HIGHLIGHTER
There are two ways to consume information: passively and actively.
One of my (many) habits that bother my fiancée is that I tear out the first page of every book I read to use as a bookmark. (She argues this is sacrilegious; I say there are more copies of the same book at the store.) This is only the start of the carnage; I also read with a highlighter and a pen in hand so I can mark up the book as I read it. The number of highlights and notes on its pages indicates how much I liked it. When I finish that first read, I go through the book a second time, rereading just the highlighted parts so I can really process the most valuable nuggets. If I can, I’ll annoy someone nearby by sharing these bits so I can process them again even more deeply.
7. WHEN YOU NOTICE YOUR FOCUS WAVERING
When you do notice your focus fading, step back from this book for a few minutes to do something relatively mindless. Whether it’s washing the dishes, people watching, or cleaning the house, you’ll effectively recharge your attention. Once your focus has been reset, return to the book with a fresh mind. And just as you’ve kept a distractions list while you read, make sure you have a place to capture ideas that come to mind during your break.
PART I - HYPERFOCUS
SWITCHING OFF AUTOPILOT MODE
AUTOPILOT MODE
We typically manage our attention on autopilot. When we receive an email from our boss, we instinctively stop what we’re doing to respond to it
We automatically focus on forming clever responses in our head before she finishes her thought
After we snap out of autopilot mode, we consider what we really ought to be doing and make the effort to realign our neurons to focus on that instead.
While falling into autopilot mode can help us keep up the pace of work and life, attention is our most limited and constrained resource. The more we can manage our attention with intention, the more focused, productive, and creative we become.
A DAY IN AUTOPILOT MODE
It’s not unusual to have a hard time focusing. There are countless everyday examples of how little control we have over our attention in our daily lives. Take, for example the following:
As you read Hyperfocus and learn to focus more deliberately, these lapses will make a lot more sense, and you’ll even learn how to prevent them.
THE FOUR TYPES OF TASKS
There are two main criteria to consider when categorizing what to focus on: whether a task is productive (you accomplish a lot by doing it) and whether a task is attractive (fun to do) or unattractive (boring, frustrating, difficult, etc.).
I’ll refer to this grid quite often, so let’s quickly take a look at each of the four categories of tasks.
A perfectly productive person would focus on only the top two quadrants of the above chart. If things were that simple, though, you wouldn’t need this book. As you’ve no doubt experienced, sticking within the borders of necessary and purposeful work is much easier said than done
I noticed something interesting as I applied the research in this book to my own life: as time passed, I began to spend less time on autopilot and focused more attention on my most purposeful and necessary tasks. As you become more deliberate about managing your attention, I think you’ll find the same to be true for your work.
THE LIMITS OF YOUR ATTENTION
Without selective interest, experience is utter chaos. —William James
Your focus determines your reality. —Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars
THE BOUNDARIES OF YOUR ATTENTION
Our attention is the most powerful tool we have to live a good life and get stuff done, but our ability to focus is constrained in two main ways.
First, there’s a finite limit to how many things we can focus on. That limit is smaller than you might think
When we choose what to focus on, we’re effectively sipping from a fire hose. One conversation, for example, consumes the majority of our attentional bits, which is why we can’t carry on two at once. According to renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, simply decoding a conversation (so we can understand it) consumes more than half of our attention. As well as interpreting a person’s words, you have to parse the meaning behind what he or she is saying
The second way that our attention is limited is that after focusing on something, we can hold only a small amount of information in our short-term memory. The ability to temporarily store information in our minds is practically a superpower, as it’s what enables us to think about what we’re doing as we’re doing it, whether that involves problem-solving tasks
MEET YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE
“Attentional space” is the term I use to describe the amount of mental capacity we have available to focus on and process things in the moment. Our attentional space is what we’re aware of at any given time—it’s the scratch pad or clipboard in our brain that we use to temporarily store information as it’s being processed. Attentional space allows us to hold, manipulate, and connect information simultaneously, and on the fly. When we choose what to pay attention to, that information occupies our short-term memory, and our attentional space ensures it’s kept active so we can continue to work with it. Together, our focus and attentional space are responsible for most of our conscious experiences
As you read, your brain is hard at work converting the raw bits of perceptual information into facts, stories, and lessons that you remember and internalize. After your eyes register the waves of light emanating from the page, your mind generates words from them. These words temporarily fill your attentional space. You then begin connecting the words to form syntactic units and clauses—the fundamental building blocks of sentences. Finally, using your attentional space as a scratch pad, your brain groups those combinations of words together into complete ideas so you can extract their higher-level meaning
WHAT’S FILLING YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE?
Directing your mental gaze to what is currently occupying your attentional space can be an odd exercise, as we rarely notice what has taken hold of our attention but spend most of our time totally immersed in what we’re experiencing. There’s a term for this process: meta-awareness. Becoming aware of what you’re thinking about is one of the best practices for managing your attention. The more you notice what’s occupying your attentional space, the faster you can get back on track when your mind begins to wander, which it does a remarkable 47 percent of the time
TASKS THAT PAIR WELL
So what exactly can fit comfortably within attentional space?
Tasks take different amounts of attentional space depending on their complexity. A meaningful conversation (as opposed to a casual one) fills up most, if not all, of it. That conversation will suffer as a result of trying to cram too many other things into your attentional space
Not all tasks require this much attentional space. There are two kinds of tasks in our life and work: habits, which we can perform without much thought and require minimal attentional space
Habitual tasks like cutting your nails, doing the laundry, archiving emails you’ve already read, and grocery shopping don’t require nearly as much attention as more complex tasks. This makes it possible to multitask without compromising the quality of your actions
There is a tipping point to attentional space, of course—doing too many habitual tasks at the same time will cause your attentional space to become overloaded. This is especially true if what you’re doing isn’t totally automatic and requires frequent mental intervention
Tasks that we can’t do out of habit—such as reading a book, having a deep conversation, or preparing a progress report for our boss—consume significantly more attentional space, because doing them well demands that we consciously manipulate information on the fly
Spending time on our most productive tasks means we usually have very little attention to spare—if there’s any left at all.
Unlike habitual tasks, we aren’t able to fit two complex activities into our attentional space at the same time. Remember, we can focus only on forty bits of information, and a single complex task requires most of these bits—and on top of this limit, we can process only so much at one time
In summary, there are generally three combinations of tasks that fit comfortably within your attentional space
We’re able to breathe while we run, pay attention to our heart rate, and enjoy music—all at the same time
Our attentional space is powerful but it’s also very limited. At best, we can do one small, habitual task plus one other activity that requires most of our attention
Your most productive tasks—the ones that enable you to accomplish significantly more for every minute you dedicate to them—fall into this category. The more time and attention you spend on these tasks, the more productive you become
ATTENTION OVERLOAD
Fitting the right amount and type of tasks into attentional space is both an art and an investment in productivity. The costs of overloading our attention can be pretty severe
Have you ever walked into your kitchen or living room and realized you’ve forgotten why you went there in the first place? You’ve fallen into an attention overload trap. You tried to cram too many things into your attentional space
If you find yourself responding to important work in autopilot mode, chances are you’re trying to cram too much into your attentional space. By not stepping back to deliberately manage your attention, you allow it to overflow
The best way to avoid this overload is to be more selective with what you permit into your attentional space
Simplifying our attentional space lets us maintain enough room to work and live intentionally throughout the day. This lets us spend more time on what’s important and meaningful in the moment
Simplifying what we focus on in the moment may feel counterintuitive: when we have so much to get done, our natural impulse is to focus on as much as possible. Compounding this is the fact that the brain’s prefrontal cortex—the large part of the forebrain that lets us plan, think logically, and get work done—has a built-in “novelty bias.
Almost every book in the wellness space has an obligatory section discussing how the brain is primitive, and that we have to learn to rise above the impulses it gives rise to. This book is no exception. An unfortunate truth is that the brain is not built to do knowledge work—it’s wired for survival and reproduction
THE COSTS ADD UP
It bears repeating that there is nothing inherently wrong with multitasking. It’s entirely possible to multitask, especially when it comes to the habitual tasks in our work and life. But it’s important to make a distinction between shifting our attention and multitasking. Multitasking means concurrently trying to focus on more than one thing at a time. Shifting our attention is the movement of our attentional spotlight (or our attentional space) from one task to another
When we make our attentional space juggle too many tasks, we fail to notice and remember the details of our most important work
Constantly shifting our attentional spotlight to focus on one thing and then another and then another not only prevents the formation of memories but also undermines our productivity
As I mentioned back in chapter 0, when we’re working in front of a computer—a device that’s obviously chock full of novel things to focus on—on average, we work for just forty seconds before we’re either interrupted or distracted (or in other words, interrupt ourselves). This number becomes even more concerning when you consider the fact that our phone is by our side and interrupting us as well
On top of the obvious productivity toll of continually interrupting ourselves, we’re also not that good at shifting our attention. Even when our attentional space is relatively clear and focused on just one task, there are deep costs associated with switching quickly to another
Switching becomes easier only once we finish a task—especially when time pressure, like a deadline, motivates us to get the task done
All this raises a question: Just how severe is the productivity cost of switching? Switching does make your work more stimulating, and its costs may be worth bearing if your work takes only 5 percent longer and you make only the occasional mistake. In practice, though, the cost is usually much greater. One study found that when we continually switch between tasks, our work takes 50 percent longer, compared with doing one task from start to completion.
THE QUALITY OF YOUR ATTENTION
Intention is the bouncer of your attentional space—it lets in the productive objects of attention and keeps the distractions out. Few things will benefit your overall quality of life more than focusing with intention. It isn’t possible to work and live with intention 100 percent of the time—demands get in the way, our focus shifts, and our attentional space overflows—but we can maintain our intention for enough of the day to accomplish a lot more than we would otherwise.
Choosing where your attention is focused and maintaining a clear attentional space accomplishes several things at once. You will
There are numerous ways to measure the quality of your attention, but I’ve developed three measures to track my own progress. You can use these yardsticks to measure your progress as you adopt the tactics in this book into your life:
Now it’s time to get tactical.
THE POWER OF HYPERFOCUS
INTRODUCING HYPERFOCUS
When you hyperfocus on a task, you expand one task, project, or other object of attention
…so it fills your attentional space completely.
You enter this mode by managing your attention deliberately and purposefully: by choosing one important object of attention, eliminating distractions that will inevitably arise as you work, and then focusing on just that one task. Hyperfocus is many things at once: it’s deliberate, undistracted, and quick to refocus, and it leads us to become completely immersed in our work. It also makes us immensely happy. Recall how energized you were by your work the last time you found yourself in this state. In hyperfocus you might even feel more relaxed than you usually are when you work. Allowing one task or project to consume your full attentional space means this state doesn’t make you feel stressed or overwhelmed
You’ll often accomplish more in one hour of hyperfocus than in an entire day spent filling your attentional space to the brim with multiple—and often undeliberate—concerns.
When it comes to your most important tasks, the fewer things you pay attention to, the more productive you become
HYPERFOCUSING ON HABITS
The most important aspect of hyperfocus is that only one productive or meaningful task consumes your attentional space. This is simply nonnegotiable. Here’s why: the most critical tasks, projects, and commitments benefit from every bit of extra attention. They’re usually not habits, which by default don’t often consume your full attentional space.
This is not to say it’s impossible to hyperfocus on a habit. There is no task too small to consume your attention—if you tried hard enough, you could commit your complete attention to watching paint dry. But there are two reasons why this mental mode is best preserved for complex tasks, rather than habits
First, hyperfocus requires willpower and mental energy to activate, drawing from the limited supply we have to make it through the day
Second, and more interesting, while your performance on complex tasks benefits when you focus more completely, your habitual-task performance actually suffers when you focus with your total attention
Save hyperfocus for your most complex tasks
THE FOUR STAGES OF HYPERFOCUS
You enter into hyperfocus when you engage both your thoughts and your external environment and direct them at one thing intentionally.
So How Do We Enter Hyperfocus Mode?
The science suggests we pass through four states as we begin to focus. First, we’re focused (and productive). Then, assuming we don’t get distracted or interrupted, our mind begins to wander. Third, we make note of this mind wandering. This can take awhile, especially if we don’t frequently check what is consuming our attentional space. (On average, we notice about five times an hour that our mind has wandered.) And fourth, we shift our focus back to our original object of attention
The four stages of hyperfocus are modeled on this framework.
To hyperfocus, you must
In addition, it takes an average of twenty-two minutes to resume working on a task after we’re distracted or interrupted. We fare even worse when we interrupt or distract ourselves—in these cases, it takes twenty-nine minutes to return to working on the original task. The more often we assess what’s occupying our attentional space, the quicker we’re able to get back on track
The concept of hyperfocus can be summed up in a single tranquil sentence: keep one important, complex object of attention in your awareness as you work
Choosing What to Focus On
Attention without intention is wasted energy. Intention should always precede attention—in fact, the two ideas pair perfectly. Intention setting allows us to decide how we should spend our time; focusing our attention on that task gets it done efficiently. The best way to become more productive is to choose what you want to accomplish before you begin working
These tasks fall into the “necessary” and “purposeful” quadrants discussed in chapter 1.
In researching attention and intention over the last few years, I’ve developed a few favorite daily intention-setting rituals. Here are my top three.
At the start of each day, choose the three things you want to have accomplished by day’s end
Make sure to keep your three intentions where you can see them—I keep mine on the giant whiteboard in my office
Considering which items on my to-do list are the most consequential.
The most important tasks on your list are the ones that lead to the greatest positive consequences
It’s pointless to set goals and intentions if you don’t act toward accomplishing them throughout the day
A key theme of Hyperfocus is that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself when you do notice your brain drifting off or doing something else weird
HOW TO SET STRONGER INTENTIONS
Importance of not only setting intentions but also making them very specific. While we often achieve our vague intentions, specific intentions greatly increase our odds of overall success.
Setting more specific intentions, however, does something remarkable: it makes our odds of success much higher
With that in mind, let’s quickly turn my three vague intentions into implementation intentions:
Implementation intentions are powerful in much the same way as habits. When you begin a habit, your brain carries out the rest of the sequence largely on autopilot
There are two notable caveats to setting specific intentions. First, you have to actually care about your intentions. Implementation intentions don’t work nearly as well for goals that don’t especially matter to you or that you’ve long abandoned
Second, easy-to-accomplish intentions don’t have to be as specific. Deciding in advance when you’ll work on a task is significantly more important for a difficult one than when your intention is to do something simple
STARTING A HYPERFOCUS RITUAL
I want to offer a few simple strategies to begin hyperfocusing on your intentions. These will become infinitely more powerful as you learn to tame the distractions in your work in advance.
Let’s first cover how to focus, and then when. Both ideas are pretty simple.
How to hyperfocus:
That covers the how. Here are a few suggestions that I have found work for deciding when you should hyperfocus:
BUILDING YOUR FOCUS
As you’ll find, your ability to hyperfocus depends on a few factors, all of which affect the quality of your attention:
TAMING DISTRACTIONS
FORTY SECONDS
The costs of an unrelated interruption can be massive: it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to resume working on an activity after we’re interrupted, and before resuming that activity, we work on an average of 2.26 other tasks. We don’t simply attend to the distraction or interruption and then return to the original task—we become distracted a second time before doing so.*
Once you become aware of how frequently you interrupt yourself, it’s hard to go back to working the same way again. This is why it is critical to manage your attentional space wisely. You can focus for so much longer by taming distractions ahead of time
WHY WE LOVE DISTRACTIONS
Let your mind be for a few seconds, and you’ll find that it gravitates to more captivating (and usually less important) objects of attention than what you should be focusing on
Our drive toward distractions is made worse by our brain’s built-in novelty bias and the fact that the websites and apps we frequent offer a hit of mindless stimulation and validation each time we visit them
Given that distractions have the potential to derail our productivity so frequently, and for so long, it’s imperative that we deal with them ahead of time—before we have to expend precious willpower to resist their allure
THE FOUR TYPES OF DISTRACTIONS
Productive tasks that are either necessary or purposeful, and unproductive tasks that are either unnecessary or distracting. In this section, we’ll focus on the distracting tasks that are fun and unproductive.
I define a “distraction” as anything that can direct us away from our intentions. In this respect, distractions and interruptions are much the same thing, because they both distance us from what we intend to accomplish
If you allocated your professional activities into the four-typesof-work grid in chapter 1, use the tasks in the distracting quadrant as a starting point to fill out the grid
To illustrate what a filled-out grid looks like, here are the typical distractions that throw off my intentions throughout the course of a day:
Let’s start with the top two quadrants—how to deal with distractions and interruptions that we can’t control.
There are two places from which distractions originate—ourselves and others—and both are important to deal with ahead of time. We can’t prevent all distractions from arising—even if we closed our office door with the intent to hyperfocus for a couple of hours, we’d still receive phone calls and the occasional knock at the door. Many distractions are preventable, but many aren’t, at least not without incurring large social costs. Research shows, however, that we interrupt ourselves just as much as we are interrupted by other people.* As Gloria Mark expressed it, “Simply looking at how we can break off external interruptions really only solves half the problem.
While we can’t prevent interruptions from arising, we can control how we respond to them. The best way to deal with annoying tasks that we can’t keep from hijacking our attentional space—office visitors, loud colleagues, and unnecessary meetings included—is to keep our original intention in mind and get back to working on it as soon as possible.
We should also be more deliberate about how we respond to the fun distractions we can’t control
DISTRACTION-FREE MODE
Most distractions fall into the category of ones we actually can control, which should therefore be tamed in advance.
Over time, I’ve developed two modes of working:
Over the course of the day, we alternate between doing two types of work: focus work and collaborative work. Focus work benefits from all the attention we can bring to it—the less we’re distracted, the more deeply we’re able to focus, and the more productive we become. This allows us, as author Cal Newport has put it, to do “deep work”.
Collaborative work, on the other hand, involves interacting with other people and being available in case you’re needed. The more you and your team are available for one another, the more productive your team as a whole becomes. When engaged in collaborative work, it’s best to enter into reduced-distraction mode, in which you’ve tamed your largest distractions but are still accessible when you’re needed
Let’s tackle the more intense, distraction-free mode first.
Creating a distraction-free mode enables you to eliminate almost every controllable distraction in advance so you can hyperfocus on your most important tasks. By removing every object of attention that’s potentially more stimulating and attractive than what you intend to do, you give your brain no choice but to work on that task.
I’m writing these words in my own distraction-free mode. To enter this mode and hyperfocus:
Which distractions derail your productivity over the course of a day? How many of them can you disable simultaneously with a blocking app or some other tactic? Write a quick plan, like the one above, that will guide you in dealing with these distractions ahead of time. When you find your attention getting derailed, reflect on what caused it so you can disable that distraction the next time around.
Here are a few more suggestions for creating your distraction-free mode:
The intensity of your distraction-free mode depends on your work environment. If you work for yourself or have an office with a door, you likely have more flexibility in eliminating distractions. If you work in a collaborative open-office environment, however, you may not be able to set up as strong a distraction-free mode as you’d like. Productivity is a process of understanding and adapting to your constraints
WORKING WITH REDUCED DISTRACTIONS
Because it’s impossible to work in hyperfocus mode 100 percent of the time, we should also learn to enjoy the benefits of cutting back on distractions during other periods of our day. To figure out which ones are worth taming, ask yourself: What distractions interrupt your focus throughout the day that aren’t worth losing twenty or more minutes of productivity over? It isn’t possible to shut off these distractions entirely, and you might not even want to, but it is worth becoming more thoughtful about what interrupts your work
Setting a specific time to focus on distractions like email, meetings, your smartphone, and social media transforms them from distractions into merely other purposeful elements of your work and life
Notifications
An activity I recommended earlier in this book was to scroll through the notification settings on all of your devices and disable audible and vibrating alerts for interruptions you can safely live without
Your Smartphone (and Other Devices)
Apart from managing the notifications that your devices pop up, it’s worth becoming deliberate about when, where, and how often you use those devices”
Here are a few more strategies to prevent your phone (and other devices) from taking over your life:
In the knowledge economy, email is one of the largest distractions we face every day—it’s usually the largest pain point for the people I speak to and coach
In addition to limiting new message alerts, here are ten of my favorite email tactics
Meetings
After email, meetings are one of the biggest distractions we face throughout the day. They also consume an inordinate amount of time. A recent study found that, on average, knowledge workers spend 37 percent of their time in meetings—which means that if you work an eight-hour day, you typically spend three hours daily in meetings
Here are four of my favorite ways to reel in the number of meetings you attend and make the ones you do take part in more productive:
The Internet
Quite a few of the distractions I’ve discussed in this section have something in common: they stem from the internet. As powerful a tool as the internet is, it distracts and interrupts us and can lead us to spend a lot of time on autopilot mode. Just as our mind wanders while we work, we often surf the internet in active daydreaming mode, switching among websites and apps without intention
SIMPLIFYING YOUR ENVIRONMENT
External environmental cues can affect us in remarkable ways. One study observed coffee shop patrons conversing with one another and discovered that those who kept their phone in front of them checked it every three to five minutes, “regardless of whether it rang or buzzed
So often these cues in our environment pull us away from what we intend to accomplish—and, on a personal level, make our experiences less meaningful. Environmental cues don’t actively interrupt us, like notifications, but they can do just as much harm to our productivity and personal life. This is especially the case when we look around for a novel distraction from a complex task. Our working environment should hold as few of these distracting cues as possible. When we keep our phone, tablet, and television in another room, we are derailed less often, become accustomed to working in a less stimulating environment, and ensure the environment around us is not more attractive than what we intend to focus on.
By eliminating the novel cues in our working environment, we give ourselves the ability to focus for much longer. It’s worth becoming deliberate about the cues you allow into your environment and questioning how they might affect your productivity
Novel objects of attention threaten to invade your attentional space and prevent you from focusing completely on any one thing
To modify your environment to be more conducive to working or living, you should eliminate objects of attention that will potentially derail your focus.
Doing this is actually pretty simple
The cleanliness of your environment is also important. Make sure you tidy your space when you’re done with it—coming home to a mess of dishes in the sink and random objects strewn all over the floor will instantly stress you out, reminding you of all the things you still have to do. The same applies when you finish working for the day: tidy the papers on your desk, close the windows on your computer, sort files on your desktop, and act on and archive each email you received that day
As you’ve probably found, environmental cues can also help our future selves. After I set my three overarching intentions for the following day at the end of the day prior, I write them on my whiteboard so they’re what I see first thing in the morning. If I need to remember to bring a few documents to a meeting, I’ll put them by the door so I see them as I leave
MUSIC
There are an awful lot of factors in the environment that affect focus—even office temperature influences productivity to some degree.* Before getting to how your internal, mental environment influences your productivity, I want to zero in on one more external factor. It may be something you work with already: music
Research suggests that the most productive music has two main attributes: it sounds familiar (because of this, music that is productive for you may differ from your coworkers’ choices), and it’s relatively simple. Jerry’s music hits both of these notes. It sounds comfortably familiar, since it’s heavily influenced by famous composers like George Gershwin. It contains no words to distract you, and it’s simple
However, research also suggests that the most productive music is relative. Music occupies at least some portion of attentional space—but it occupies less when it’s familiar, simple, and also relatively quiet. As a result, music is no competition for a quiet environment when it comes to focus, but of course, music never exists in isolation
CLEARING YOUR MIND
Of course, not all distractions are external, as we also keep a lot of distracting stuff in our heads
It’s impossible to write about focus and productivity without citing David Allen’s work. Allen is the author of Getting Things Done, a book with a simple premise: that our brain is for having ideas, not for holding them. An empty brain is a productive brain, and the more stuff we get out of our heads, the more clearly we think
Something remarkable happens when you externalize tasks and commitments: you work with almost no guilt, worry, or doubt. You experience guilt when you feel tension about your past; worry when you feel tension about your future; and doubt and stress when you feel tension about the present moment
Unresolved mental loops can tug at your attention throughout the day, especially when you’re immersed in your most important work. Begin closing these open loops so you can focus, and hyperfocus, more easily on your work.
WORKING WITH PURPOSE
Here is a fundamental truth about focus: your brain will invariably resist more complex tasks, especially when you’re first starting them—and when it does, you’ll look around for more novel and stimulating things to do instead. When you clear your working environment of interruptions, distractions, and cues that will tempt you away from what you intend to accomplish in the moment, you’ll stay on track. This chapter was long for a simple reason: there’s a lot of brush you need to clear before you can hyperfocus
Recall the three measures we can use to measure the quality of our attention: how much time we spend working with intention; how long we’re able to focus on one task; and how long our mind wanders before we catch it doing so.
All three measures are supported by the tactics in this chapter:
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One final benefit of eliminating distractions in advance is gaining the freedom to work at a slower, more purposeful pace
Carving out more attentional space for what you’re doing also enables you to work with greater awareness—of what distractions you’re resisting, how you feel about your work, how much energy you have, and whether you need to recharge
So far we’ve covered the four stages of hyperfocus: choosing an object of attention, eliminating distractions, focusing on a task, and getting back on track
MAKING HYPERFOCUS A HABIT
WHAT MAKES OUR MINDS WANDER
There is a wealth of research that examines why our mind wanders at the exact time we’re trying to focus. It does so significantly more when
THE POWER OF MAKING YOUR WORK HARDER
Depending on their complexity, tasks will require varying amounts of your attentional space
Consciously making your tasks more complex, and taking on more complex ones, is another powerful way to enter into a hyperfocused state, as they will consume more of your attention. This will keep you more engaged in what you’re doing and lead your mind to wander less often
In his groundbreaking book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers intriguing insights about when we’re most likely to enter into a flow state: when the challenge of completing a task is roughly equal to our ability to do so, and we become totally immersed in the task. When our skills greatly exceed the demands of a task—such as when we do mindless data entry for several hours—we feel bored. When the demands of a task exceed our skills—such as when we’re unprepared to give a presentation—we feel anxious. When the demands of a task are roughly equal to our ability to do that task—when we’re playing an instrument, immersed in a book, or skiing down a freshly powdered slope—we’re a lot more likely to be fully engaged in what we’re doing.
The tactics in Hyperfocus will allow you to accomplish more in less time, but you may then find you don’t have enough work remaining to fill that extra time. This can manifest itself in some odd ways.
Our work tends to expand to fit the available completion time—in productivity circles, this phenomenon is known as Parkinson’s law
To measure if you have enough work in general, assess how much of your day you spend doing unproductive busywork. If you’re high on the busywork scale, you may have room to take on significantly more tasks—and become more engaged and productive in the process.
This advice is counterintuitive, and the very idea may turn you off if you already feel you’re working at capacity. But it’s worth considering. When we do knowledge work for a living, we procrastinate, spending time and attention on email and social media, tasks that make us feel productive in our work but lead us to accomplish little
INCREASING THE SIZE OF YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE
Most of the focus strategies I’ve discussed so far involve becoming a better custodian of your attentional space. In addition to more deliberately managing it, you can also increase its size
So how exactly do you expand the size of your attentional space?
There is, however, one practice that has been proven in study after study to increase working memory capacity: meditation
In breathing meditation (the most common form, and the one I’ve personally practiced for about a decade), you notice the characteristics of your breath: how deeply it ebbs and flows, its temperature, where it is most prominent in your body
You’ll be able to focus for longer, your mind will wander less, and you’ll be able to work with greater intention.
You experience this same benefit during hyperfocus. Like meditation, hyperfocus is a practice that compounds upon itself—the more you practice, the more you learn to manage your attention and the longer you’re able to focus the next time around.
Mindfulness is about becoming conscious of what is filling your mind and noticing the circumstances of the current moment. This includes noting anything you happen to be perceiving, feeling, or thinking. Mindfulness differs from hyperfocus in one major respect: it’s about focusing on the circumstances of the present, rather than becoming immersed in them
Practices like meditation and mindfulness are also powerful because they train you to practice holding a single intention in your mind for a given period of time. During your meditation, you sit with the intention of being with your breath until your timer goes off. The same is true when you practice mindfulness: until the coffee cup is empty (or half full), your shower is finished, or you’re done walking to where you intend to go, you focus on what you’re doing then and there. When you keep a single intention in mind, you’re able to live and work more intentionally for the rest of the day too
HYPERFOCUS AT HOME
Almost every idea in this book will help you not only at work but at home too. As I’ve put these ideas into practice, I’ve noticed some remarkable benefits in my personal life.
Chances are you were in hyperfocus mode during your last highly productive work period. You were likely in a similar state the last time you felt happiest and energized at home. You were probably focused on just one thing—whether that was carrying on a meaningful conversation with a loved one, planting a garden, playing cards with a relative, or relaxing with a book on the beach. The one thing you were doing consumed your full attentional space
Hyperfocus” was the best term I could come up with to describe this state of being totally focused on one thing, though it does have the disadvantage of sounding dauntingly intense
When we’re hyperfocusing on an activity at home—whether it’s playing an instrument, walking the dog, or making dinner for the family—disabling the pointless, novel distractions and focusing completely on what we’re doing means we are purposefully disengaging from our work. This practice gets easier with time. I’ve devoted an entire later chapter of this book to recharging hyperfocus—we can do this by periodically stepping back from our work to let our mind rest, wander, and take on less challenging tasks. Spending our time at home more purposefully also enables us to feel recharged
FOUR (MORE) WAYS TO BATTLE YOUR RESISTANCE TO HYPERFOCUS
Assuming you’ve already given hyperfocus a try, even if only for ten minutes, you may have felt what I did at first: a mental resistance to focusing on just one thing. This was probably a mixture of restlessness, anxiousness, and succumbing to novel distractions. You likely found yourself craving these distractions more than usual in the initial stage of entering the hyperfocused state.
This resistance we feel toward complex and productive tasks isn’t distributed evenly across working time—it’s usually concentrated at the beginning of when we start these tasks:
For example, while it might take weeks to summon the energy and stamina needed to clean the garage or bedroom closet, once we do it for even just a minute, we could keep going for hours. The same is true for working out—after we overcome our resistance to getting started, we can go on with the rest of our workout. Starting provides enough momentum to carry out our intentions.
This is true of our most complex tasks as well, and is one of the many reasons we’ll work on a task for only forty seconds before falling victim to distractions. We feel the most resistance at the very start and search instead for more attractive alternatives. When we begin a new task, working on it for at least one minute with purposeful attention and limited distractions is critical. Here are my four favorite strategies for battling this initial resistance:
THE POWER OF HYPERFOCUS
Every idea in Hyperfocus is designed to help you more deliberately manage your attention—an essential idea when our attention is so limited and in demand.
Let’s recap a few of these ideas:
THE POWER OF MIND WANDERING
To this point in the book I’ve discussed only the negative effects of a wandering mind. At times when we need to focus, these mental strolls can undermine our productivity.
However, this mind-wandering mode—when we scatter our attention and focus—can also be immensely powerful. In fact, it’s so powerful that I’ve devoted the second part of Hyperfocus to it. I call this mode “scatterfocus,” because in it, our attention scatters to focus on nothing in particular. While hyperfocus involves directing your attention outward, scatterfocus is about directing it inward, inside your own mind
Just as hyperfocus is the most productive mode of the brain, scatterfocus is the most creative. Scatterfocus can derail our productivity when our original intent is to focus, but when we’re coming up with a creative solution to a problem, planning for our future, or making a difficult decision, it is just as essential as hyperfocus. We can harness the remarkable benefits of scatterfocus by practicing intentional mind wandering.
Learning how to use each mode intelligently will make you more productive, creative, and happy.
Let’s dive into this second mental mode now. As you’ll quickly see, hyperfocus and scatterfocus can work hand in hand in some truly remarkable ways
PART II - SCATTERFOCUS
YOUR BRAIN’S HIDDEN CREATIVE MODE
Not all those who wander are lost. —J. R. R. Tolkien
INTRODUCING SCATTERFOCUS
The second part of this book is devoted to the power of mind wandering and directing your attention inward
Yes, you heard that right—after encouraging you in the first part of the book to rid yourself of that style of thinking, I’m about to explain the strengths of mind wandering. Part of its bad reputation is warranted: when our intention is to focus, daydreaming can destroy our productivity. But daydreaming is immensely potent when our intention is to solve problems, think more creatively, brainstorm new ideas, or recharge. As far as boosting our creativity is concerned, mind wandering is in a league of its own
Just as hyperfocus is your brain’s most productive mode, scatterfocus is its most creative.
Entering scatterfocus mode is easy: you simply let your mind be. Just as you hyperfocus by intentionally directing your attention toward one thing, you scatterfocus by deliberately letting your mind wander. You enter this mode whenever you leave attentional space free around what you’re doing in the moment—whether going for a run, biking, or investing time in anything that doesn’t consume your full attentional space.
When it comes to productivity and creativity, scatterfocus enables you to do three powerful things at once
WHY WE’RE AVERSE TO SCATTERFOCUS
Despite the productive and creative benefits of scatterfocus, most of us are somewhat hesitant to engage this mode. While it’s easy to get excited about becoming highly productive and hyperfocused, scattering our attention is less exciting, at least on the surface
We focus on certain objects of attention by default, and doing so is what has allowed the human species to survive. We’ve already discussed the first type of object of attention that draws us in: anything that’s novel
We’re also more likely to focus on anything that’s pleasurable or threatening
Today the balance of these three objects of attention has been tipped. We’re continually surrounded by novel distractions, pleasures are plentiful, and legitimate threats are few and far between
But in practice we don’t actually experience negative mind-wandering episodes that often. Our mind primarily wanders to the negative when we’re thinking about the past, but we wander to the past just 12 percent of the time—the remainder is spent thinking about the present and the future, which makes scatterfocus remarkably productive
OH, THE PLACES OUR MIND GOES
When your mind wanders, it visits three main places: the past, the present, and the future. This is precisely why scattering your attention allows your creativity to flourish as you travel through time and connect what you’ve learned to what you’re doing or what you want to achieve
Even though we spend just 12 percent of our scatterfocus time thinking about the past, we’re more likely to remember these thought episodes, compared with when we think about the present or future
In addition to thinking about the past, our mind wanders to the present 28 percent of the time. While we’re not moving our work forward during these wanderings, they can still be productive
Finally, our mind wanders to think about the future 48 percent of the time—more than our past and present thinking combined
Every moment of our lives is like a Choose Your Own Adventure story—continually offering different options that allow us to define our future path. Scatterfocus lets us better imagine these paths
As well as helping you plan for the future, recharge, and connect ideas, research suggests that scatterfocus mode also leads you to
THE THREE STYLES OF SCATTERFOCUS
There are two ways your mind wanders: unintentionally and intentionally. Unintentional wandering takes place without your awareness, when you don’t choose to enter into the mode. This is where I draw the line between mind wandering and scatterfocus. Scatterfocus is always intentional
Intention is what makes scatterfocus so powerful. This mode is always deployed deliberately—and involves making a concerted effort to notice where your mind goes.
I’ve found it helpful to distinguish among a few different styles of scatterfocus
Of the three styles, capture mode is best for identifying what’s on your mind; problem-crunching mode is best for mulling over a specific problem or idea; and habitual mode is best for recharging and connecting the greatest number of ideas
For years I have been scheduling one or two fifteen-minute chunks of time each week to let my mind wander freely, during which I capture any valuable and actionable material. This practice is as simple as sitting with coffee, a pen, and a notebook and waiting to see what rises to the surface of my consciousness
Of the three styles of scatterfocus, you’ll probably find capture mode to be the most aversive—at least initially. Many people find the process boring, but this is precisely what leads your mind to wander and creates the space for ideas to rise to the surface of your attentional space. Cutting yourself off from distractions naturally turns your attention inward, as your thoughts become more interesting than anything in your external environment
Problem-crunching mode is most useful when you’re brainstorming a solution to a specific problem.
To enter this mode, hold a problem in your mind and let your thoughts wander around it, turn it over, and explore it from different angles. Whenever your mind ventures off to think about something unrelated or gets stuck on one point, gently nudge your attention back to what you intended to think about, or the problem you intended to solve
Problem-crunching mode gives your mind the space and freedom to make these large leaps in your thinking. Try entering this mode if you haven’t been able to solve a specific, nonlinear problem in a traditional way
Habitual scatterfocus is the most powerful style of this mode, and it’s the one I recommend practicing the most often
For starters, scatterfocus mode is actually fun when you’re engaged in a habitual activity you find pleasurable. Wandering your mind around one idea or capturing your thoughts can sometimes feel tedious, but when you do something habitual that you enjoy—like walking to get a coffee, woodworking, or swimming laps—scatterfocus becomes significantly more enjoyable
As well as being more fun, habitual tasks have been shown to yield the greatest number of creative insights when compared with switching to another demanding task, resting, or taking no break whatsoever
Habitual tasks also encourage your mind to continue wandering. When you let your mind rest and wander, chances are you’ll want to continue this scatterfocus exercise until you’ve finished whatever you started
At the risk of repeating this too often, the key to practicing habitual scatterfocus is to frequently check what thoughts and ideas are in your attentional space. This is especially important with habitual scatterfocus, since more things are vying for your attention simultaneously
HOW HYPERFOCUS HELPS YOU SCATTERFOCUS
There are numerous ways to guide your mind to wander even more productively when practicing intentional scatterfocus
Practicing hyperfocus—and deliberately managing your attention—provides a host of benefits: expanding your attentional space so you can focus on more tasks simultaneously, improving your memory, and letting you become more aware of the thoughts flying around your head.
The size of your attentional space is one of the biggest determinants of how fruitful your scatterfocus episodes will be. The bigger the better, as it will allow you to keep more in mind while scatterfocusing
The more often you do this check, the more productive your mind-wandering episodes will be. You will be better able to move your thoughts away from the past and instead think about current ideas and the future
RETHINKING BOREDOM
Answer this question honestly: When was the last time you were bored?
Really think about it. Can you remember?
Chances are it was a long time ago, maybe before welcoming devices into your life. Never in human history have we divided our attention among so many things. In the moment this can feel like a benefit—we always have something to do—but the disadvantage is that distracting devices have basically eliminated boredom from our lives
It’s no wonder that boredom eludes us when we always have a device to reach for or a distracting website to visit—there is always something to amuse us in the moment. As a consequence, we don’t often find ourselves having to adjust to a lower level of stimulation
We defragment our thoughts when we carve out space between tasks. This helps us think clearly and gives us extra attention to process relationships experiences, ideas, and problems we can’t figure out. In these moments, boredom and scatterfocus are powerful because they enable useful self-examination.
As I hope you’ll agree, these activity gaps are just as valuable as the activities themselves. It’s time to reclaim them.
RECHARGING YOUR ATTENTION
WHEN YOU SHOULD RECHARGE
As well as enabling you to set intentions more often and improving your creativity, scatterfocus helps you recharge
Our energy levels influence how well we’re able to focus. You probably felt the effects of this the last time you missed a few hours of sleep or skipped your work breaks. Odds are that all three measures of the quality of your attention decreased: you couldn’t focus for as long, you were distracted and sidetracked by other tasks or interests more frequently, and you found yourself working on autopilot more often
There are many signs that indicate you’re running low on energy and should recharge your attention by deliberately entering scatterfocus mode
TAKING MORE REFRESHING BREAKS
Many people burn through an inordinate amount of time doing work that doesn’t make them happy. Doing work you love is significantly less exhausting than doing work you don’t care about—focus always feels more forced for the latter. The more you care, the more mileage you’ll get out of your attention. Research also suggests that your mind wanders less when you’re doing something you genuinely enjoy.
In addition to scatterfocus’s other benefits, practicing it provides a pocket of time in which you don’t have to regulate your behavior, which is energy restorative
There are countless refreshing and enjoyable break activities, each of which will let you experience the immense benefits of habitual scatterfocus while not taking away from your ability to hyperfocus once the break ends
Here are a few other break activities that have worked for me, and for the people I’ve coached:
TIMING
So when and how often should you step back from your work?
Because no two people are the same, the frequency and length of breaks depend on countless factors
Frequent recharging may also be necessary if you find you aren’t motivated by a particular project, or by your work in general. The more you need to regulate your behavior—to resist distractions and temptations or push yourself to get things done
Research on the value of breaks points to two simple rules:
This may seem like a lot of time across an eight-hour workday, but it’s approximately equivalent to taking a one-hour lunch break and a fifteen-minute break in the morning and afternoon. In most situations these two rules are practical and can be carried out without affecting your work schedule.
Why is ninety minutes the magic number? Our mental energy tends to oscillate in ninety-minute waves. We sleep in ninety-minute cycles, moving between periods of light, deep, and REM sleep. Our energy continues to follow the same rhythm after we wake: we feel rested for around ninety minutes and then tired for a short period of time—around twenty to thirty minutes
And why should we have a fifteen-minute break for each hour of work? There isn’t a lot of reliable research on this subject, but one company did try to crunch the numbers. A time-tracking app called DeskTime—which automatically tracks the computer programs you have open so you can see at day’s end how productive you were—assessed the break data for the most productive 10 percent of its users. They discovered that, on average, these users took a seventeen-minute break after every fifty-two minutes of work
The best time to take a break is before you need to. Much as you’re probably already dehydrated when you feel thirsty, your focus and productivity have likely already begun to falter by the time you feel fatigued.
SLEEP
Speaking of rest, it would be remiss of me to not discuss sleep.
I personally have a (granted, somewhat pseudoscientific) rule that I think is worth following when it comes to sleep: For every hour of sleep you miss, you lose two hours of productivity the next day. There’s no scientific backing for this rule—as with breaks, we’re all wired differently—but the amount of sleep we get matters a great deal, especially with regard to knowledge work. We lose more than we gain when we compromise our sleep to work longer hours.
If you were to place someone who is dreaming and another person who is daydreaming into a brain-scanning machine, you’d notice something peculiar: the two brain scans would be eerily similar. Sleep dreaming and daydreaming in scatterfocus mode activate the same brain regions, though they’re even more active while we’re asleep. On a neurological level, dreaming is scatterfocus mode on steroids.
The mind has a chance to defragment its thoughts during both sleep and mind-wandering episodes, as well as to consolidate the information it’s been learning and processing
In addition to the productivity toll, the costs of working with a sleep deficit are numerous
REST IS NOT IDLENESS
It often doesn’t feel right to step back and rest when you have more work to do than time to do it—you may even feel twinges of guilt. This is usually just self-doubt rearing its ugly head: as you consider the opportunity costs of taking a break, you begin thinking of all the other things you should be working on instead. Taking a break feels less productive than getting real work done, so you feel at fault when you even consider stepping back.
This logic doesn’t hold water in practice. In fact, taking a break is one of the most productive things you can do. As we’ve discussed, your brain has a limited pool of energy, and once that reserve is depleted, so too are your focus and productivity. Breaks not only allow you to recharge—they prevent you from hitting a wall.
Whenever we rest, we exchange our time for energy
CONNECTING DOTS
BECOMING MORE CREATIVE
Hyperfocus is about focusing on a single thing. This lets your brain become productive, encode information and experiences so that you remember them later, and engage with the world around you. In scatterfocus mode you do the opposite: you zoom out and connect the constellations of “dots” in your head (a “dot” being any piece of information you hold in your mind).
On a neurological level, our brain is a constellation of dot-filled networks—and we’re constantly adding more with every new experience. We gather dots when we’re creating memories with loved ones, studying history, or reading the biographies of people who lived through it—which helps us understand the sequences of ideas that created the world we live in today
We’re not always aware of the ideas our attentional space pans over as we move among our thoughts—like an iceberg that resides mostly underwater, much of this process takes place in the depths of our consciousness
INSIGHT TRIGGERS
Uncompleted tasks and projects weigh more heavily on our minds than ones we’ve finished—focus comes when we close these distracting open loops. We’re wired to remember what we’re in the middle of more than what we’ve completed. In psychology circles this phenomenon is called the Zeigarnik effect, after Bluma Zeigarnik, the first person to study this concept. The Zeigarnik effect can be annoying when we’re trying to focus, but the opposite is true when we scatter our attention. In fact, it leads to amazing insights into the problems we’re incubating.
Chances are you’ve experienced a few eureka moments yourself. Maybe they struck while you were making breakfast, getting the mail, or walking through an art gallery
When we’re in habitual scatterfocus mode, potential insight triggers come from two places: our wandering minds themselves and the external environment
Thanks to the Zeigarnik effect, your mind will automatically connect your new experiences to this problem, whether you realize it or not. You return to work, still frustrated, with the number imprinted on your brain. You find your mind returning to it periodically, sometimes even against your will. In fact, odds are that your mind will wander more often than usual—our thoughts drift more often when we’re in the middle of solving a complex problem—which will cause you to make a higher-than-normal number of mistakes in your work
Insight is a notoriously difficult subject to study. To do so, you have to lead people to an impasse on a problem and maintain sufficient interest in it to make them want to solve it later. Luckily, you don’t need the results of research to support these findings—you probably have enough data at your disposal in the form of your own past experiences
CONNECTING EVEN MORE DOTS
Simply entering habitual scatterfocus mode will enable you to experience the remarkable benefits I’ve covered so far. But if you want to level up even further, here are six ways to do so.
Immersing yourself in a setting that contains potential insight triggers is a powerful practice
Writing down the detailed problems you’re tackling at work and at home helps your mind continue to process them in the background
As I mentioned earlier, dreaming is scatterfocus on steroids: while you’re sleeping, your mind continues to connect dots
Deep and freeform connections come especially strongly as you dream during the REM stage of sleep
Research suggests that the larger your attentional space, the more likely you are to continue stubbornly hammering away at complex tasks on which you’re stuck. This is where scatterfocus trounces hyperfocus—scatterfocus is much better at piecing together solutions to complex, nonlinear problems
The more abruptly stop working on a creative task, the more you’ll think about it when you switch to another.
We are what we consume. You can take deeper advantage of scatterfocus mode when you become deliberate about the information you take in. Consuming new dots exposes a wealth of new information and triggers that you can use to solve complex problems
COLLECTING DOTS
CLUSTERING
Unresolved problems aren’t the only things that sit at the front of our minds. All of the other dots we’ve accumulated matter just as much, if not more. This knowledge is what helps us become more creative in scatterfocus mode: the more valuable the dots we collect, the more we have to connect.
In practice, the dots we consume and connect are so important because our focus is always filtered through what we already know
Reading is a compelling example of the power of collecting and connecting dots. By learning something new, you transfer dots from your external environment to your memory so you can link them and make use of them later. From the moment you’re born to the day you die, your brain is always engaged in this process.
We do the same by collecting more dots related to our own work and investing in building relevant knowledge and skills
We are what we pay attention to, and almost nothing influences our productivity and creativity as much as the information we’ve consumed in the past. Accumulating many valuable dots helps us in innumerable ways. We become able to connect our challenges with the lessons we’ve learned
THE VALUE OF A DOT
No two pieces of information are created equal. Consuming a book or having an engaging conversation with someone smarter than you will enable you to collect more valuable dots than doing something like watching TV or reading a gossip magazine
If you’re in doubt about consuming something, ask yourself: How do you think your life will be different knowing this piece of information
COLLECTING MORE VALUABLE DOTS
On the left side of this chart are the most useful dots we consume. This information is actionable, is accurate, helps us reach our goals, and remains relevant for a long time. It may also be related to what we already know—so it allows us to connect and cluster more valuable dots—or unrelated to what we know, leading to more serendipitous connections. For me, things like nonfiction books, online courses, and journal articles about productivity are in this category.
Finally, there’s the bottom third of what we consume: information that’s entertaining or, at worst, trashy. Though, like junk food, it can be fun to consume in the moment, this information is the least dense, isn’t practical, and won’t help you live your life or reach your goals. This category includes the TV shows we binge-watch, the mindless books we read, and most social media websites. We usually consume this material passively on autopilot mode. While some of it is genuinely entertaining—the top 50 percent or so—the bottom half is trash information and is usually some combination of novel, pleasurable, and threatening, characteristics that make it easy to crave.
As a rule, we should
There are two steps to upping the quality of information you collect:
Once you’ve taken stock, here are ten ideas for how you can change your habits to intentionally consume more valuable information. Start by trying two or three that resonate particularly strongly with you.
LIKE MAGIC
As we continue to assemble a constellation of dots around a certain topic, ideas begin to build upon one another. Eventually ideas become magic
I’ve had an obsession with magic tricks since I can remember, but I find figuring out the workings behind a complex illusion far more satisfying than seeing the trick itself. Illusions stop being magical the moment you discover how they’re done—but learning how they’re done feels like a eureka moment in and of itself, as a set of jumbled puzzle pieces locks into place.
MAKING SCATTERFOCUS A HABIT
I hope that by now I’ve sold you on the remarkable benefits of scatterfocus mode. Scatterfocus lets you find useful connections between disparate ideas and experiences, recharge, and plan for the future. To reap these benefits, you simply have to let your mind rest and wander—preferably while doing something habitual.
How frequently you should scatter your attention will depend on a host of factors
Scattering your attention will be particularly beneficial when your work demands that you connect more complex, disparate ideas
The brain needs a few minutes to switch between hyperfocus and scatterfocus. Therefore, taking scatterfocus breaks that are at least fifteen minutes long will yield better results than trying to take advantage of tiny chunks of time throughout the day. But even brief breaks will help you become more creative, for while they may not leave sufficient time to piece together complex eureka insights, they’ll definitely enable you to set intentions for what to do next, rest, and capture the open loops at the top of your mind
WORKING TOGETHER
BLENDING HYPERFOCUS AND SCATTERFOCUS
In many ways hyperfocus and scatterfocus are complete opposites. At any given moment, we’re either doing something (with external attention) or thinking about something (with internal attention). We’re unable to be in both hyperfocus mode and scatterfocus mode at the same time.
For all of the ways they differ, though, there are a lot of useful opportunities for the two modes to work together. When we focus, we consume and collect dots; when we scatter our attention, we connect these dots. Hyperfocusing allows us to remember more, which leads to more valuable connections made in scatterfocus mode. Scatterfocus lets us recharge, which in turn provides more energy to hyperfocus. The insights we unearth in scatterfocus help us work smarter later. In these ways and others, deliberately managing our attention is a practice with compounding benefits.
There are several strategies you can deploy that let you take greater advantage of both hyperfocus and scatterfocus. These strategies will help regardless of which mode you happen to be in.
INVEST IN YOUR HAPPINESS
It’s important to make a distinction between legitimately investing in happiness and merely thinking more positively. To put it bluntly, positive thinking does not work to make you more happy or productive. In fact, research has shown it’s counterproductive
What does work to increase our level of happiness? Spending time on things that boost our level of positive affect: how good we feel. There is a wealth of actual research demonstrating that becoming happier helps us manage our attention, as well as suggesting proven ways to boost our level of happiness. Curiously, the more we invest in our happiness, the more productive we become in hyperfocus mode and the more creative we become in scatterfocus mode.
First, and most important, a positive mood expands the size of your attentional space, regardless of which mode you’re in
When you’re happy, the amount of dopamine in the logical part of your brain rises, which leads you to approach your work with more energy and vigor—and because you have more attentional space to work with, you have the resources you need to focus more deeply and accomplish more. Being in a good mood also makes you better at recalling information on the fly. You also consume information more actively: the happier you are, the more likely you are to put ideas together in new and interesting ways
On the other hand, a negative mood shrinks the size of your attentional space. Unhappy people are less productive—full stop. The less happy you are, the more often your mind wanders against your will, and the less attention you bring to what’s in front of you. The less happy you feel, the more important it is to tame distractions, as you have less attentional space and energy to resist them
People who are unhappy also take longer to refocus after an interruption and dwell more often on their failures
Here are the top five activities that made them the happiest:
WORK AROUND YOUR ENERGY LEVELS
As you’ve probably experienced, energy levels over the course of the day are anything but constant. They fluctuate according to when your body is programmed to have the most energy (e.g., if you happen to be an early bird or a night owl), how often you exercise, what you eat, and whether you get enough sleep.
Like energy levels, your focus and productivity aren’t consistent either. You’re the most productive when you dedicate your energy-rich moments to your most complex, meaningful tasks.
There’s a flip side to this concept when it comes to scatterfocus. Scatterfocus is most powerful when you have the least energy. Your brain is less inhibited during these periods and doesn’t hold back the ideas it generates.
Energy levels also fluctuate throughout the week: we’re typically the least engaged with our work on Mondays, when we experience the most boredom, and are the most engaged on Fridays.* Everyone is different, of course
DRINK ALCOHOL AND CAFFEINE STRATEGICALLY
As far as decreasing your inhibitions is concerned, you’re probably familiar with the effects of alcohol. Much like being tired, drinking has been shown to make people better at solving creative problems
If you’re into meditation, experiment with having a drink or two before your next evening session. You’ll experience this effect firsthand: consuming alcohol makes your mind wander more often while at the same time decreasing your meta-awareness. Alcohol affects two aspects of the quality of your attention: not only will you focus for a shorter period of time, but also it will take you longer to realize that your mind has wandered.
In practice, alcohol is worth consuming only for very select tasks. If it’s the end of the day and you want to brainstorm, sipping a wobbly pop will help. But keep in mind that it helps precisely because it decreases how much control you have over your attention.
Caffeine is another drug to consider consuming strategically. When it comes to managing attention, caffeine has the polar opposite effect of alcohol: while alcohol helps us scatterfocus, caffeine helps us hyperfocus.
The research is conclusive: caffeine boosts mental (and physical) performance in pretty much every measurable way:
In general, these effects diminish after the consumption of approximately 200 milligrams of caffeine
Caffeine can also boost your performance on physical work and exercise—it helps you perform in hot conditions, boosts strength-training performance, and increases your tolerance for pain during exercise
Because of these costs, choose caffeine when you’ll actually benefit from the mental or physical performance boost. Provided it’s not too late in the day, consume a bit of caffeine the next time you’re about to hyperfocus on a task or hit the gym for a big workout.* Instead of having a cup of coffee after you awake, wait until you get to work so you’ll benefit from the boost when you work on your most productive tasks. If you have a brainstorming meeting first thing in the morning, consume caffeine after the session, keeping the walls of your attentional space low to let more ideas flow. If you have a pitch meeting, on the other hand, do the opposite.
OPEN OFFICES
I give productivity talks in many different workplaces, and over time I’ve noticed more companies adopting an open-office plan. Open offices are a mixed bag when it comes to focus and productivity.
It’s easiest to focus when we work in an environment we can control, and obviously we have less control over our environment, and therefore our attention, in an open office. Research supports this: we distract ourselves 64 percent more often in an open environment, and we’re interrupted by others more often as well. An open office can seriously undermine your productivity if you do a lot of work that requires focused attention.
Open offices do have their benefits. One is that they support working for longer on a single project before switching to another. The reason for this is interesting: while our colleagues interrupt us more in an open environment, they’re also more considerate about when they do
The bottom line when it comes to open-office plans is that if the work you and your team does is hypercollaborative or involves a great deal of creativity and connecting ideas, an open office is probably worth its disadvantages. If your work involves a significant number of tasks that benefit from undisturbed focus, as more and more jobs seem to, an open office can be detrimental to your productivity.
CREATING A FOCUS RITUAL
By now we’ve covered how to integrate both hyperfocus and scatterfocus into your life and make a habit out of entering each mode daily.
Enter hyperfocus mode at least once a day to deal with your most productive tasks; eliminate distractions and concentrate on one important thing. Enter scatterfocus multiple times a day—particularly habitual scatterfocus mode—so that you can plan for the future, connect ideas, and recharge your ability to hyperfocus. Do the same at home, hyperfocusing on meaningful experiences and conversations and scatterfocusing when you need to plan, rest, or ideate.
When doing the same for your own schedule, ask yourself questions like these:
THE POWER OF MANAGING YOUR ATTENTION WELL
The benefits of effectively managing your attention are innumerable
For starters, you feel more in control as you turn off autopilot mode and manage your attention deliberately. You begin to understand its limits and become better able to work within them—learning when you can and can’t multitask. Your life becomes more meaningful, because you pay greater attention to meaningful experiences and process them more deeply. In this way, meaning isn’t something we try to find—it’s something we make an effort to notice. You get more done, because you’re actually able to focus on important matters. You’re able to think more clearly and become more engaged with your work. You plan for the future and set intentions more frequently. You feel better rested and less guilty about taking a step back. And you connect more ideas, while amassing constellations of them in your mind about topics that drive your curiosity further. This inspires you to become more creative, lets you work smarter and more intuitively, and makes you more productive on creative projects.
Hyperfocus can help you get an extraordinary amount done in a relatively short period of time. Scatterfocus lets you connect ideas—which helps you unearth hidden insights, become more creative, plan for the future, and rest. Together they will enable you to work and live with purpose.
Your attention is the most powerful tool at your disposal to live and work with greater productivity, creativity, and purpose. Managing it well will enable you to spend more time and energy on your most purposeful tasks and to work more often with intention, focus for longer periods, and stumble into fewer unwanted daydreams.
I hope you spend it wisely.